UP: Yogi govt shuts down Lucknow for immersion of Vajpayee’s ashes

It is an unanimous thought that Atal Bihari Vajpayee won and lost elections with grace and lived and died with dignity. But Yogi Adityanath government on Thursday appeared hell bent on dragging the former prime minister into an unnecessary controversy by disrupting day-to-day life of the commuters, shopkeepers and students to take out a procession of 16 urns containing his ashes.

The traffic was stalled from Lucknow’s Amausi Airport to Jhulelal Park along the Gomti, a stretch of over 16 kms for about six hours as the Bharatiya Janata Party organised an impressive road show of Vajpayee’s ashes. The traders were forced to put down the shutters and many schools and colleges were closed on the direction of the district administration “to avoid inconvenience to the people.” Eleven stages were set up on the route to offer floral tributes as the road show would pass through.

Some private schools, which opened in the morning on Wednesday, were closed by 11 am on the direction of the district magistrate so that the students could reach home before the procession, which was led by Yogi Adityanath and deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, would begin.

One of the urns of the ashes was immersed in the Gomti in Lucknow after a condolence meeting.

The state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey said the ashes kept in 15 other vessels would be immersed in other districts of the state on August 24 and 25.

Jai Prakash Nishad and Kameshwar Singh would take the ashes to Gorakhpur on Friday and it would be immersed in river Rapti by Yogi. Likewise, BJP ministers and leaders would take the ashes to Allahabad, Azamgarh, Ayodhya, Basti, Jhansi, Kanpur, Chitrakoot, Garhmukteshwar, Moradabad, Kasganj, Bareilly, Saharanpur, Mirzapur and other districts in the form of a procession.

“That would again be the time to halt the life of the people living on those routes,” said Dwijendra Tripathi, UP Congress spokesperson.

“It has happened for the first time in my 20 years of career as a school teacher and principal that I saw the schools were closed just because a political party took out a procession just to carry the ashes urns from one to the other place. We have heard that Vajpayee was a genuine leader. Obviously he would have disliked such processions, which prevent classes when we were under pressure to complete the syllabus of Class XII students by October and start taking internal tests to prepare them for board examinations,” said a principal of a private school on condition of anonymity.

Vajpayee had represented Lucknow Parliament seat from 1991 to 2009. He had lost to the Congress candidates in 1952, 1957 and 1962.